Comrades, I am very glad to greet the congress on extracurricular education. Of course, you do not expect from me a speech that could go into the substance of the matter, as did our well-informed comrade Lunacharsky, the previous speaker, who is specially concerned with this question. Allow me to confine myself only to a few words of greeting and to some small observations and reflections that I have had occasion to make when, in the Council of People's Commissars, I came into contact to any considerable degree with your direct work. I am convinced that one would scarcely find such an area of Soviet activity as extracurricular education and enlightenment where such enormous successes have been achieved in a year and a half. It is beyond doubt that in this area it was easier for us and for you to work than in other areas. Here we had to cast aside the old obstacles and old hindrances. Here it was easier to meet that enormous need for knowledge, for free education, for free development, which has made itself most felt among the workers' and peasants' masses. For if it was easy for us, thanks to the mighty pressure of the masses, to cast off those external obstacles that stood in their way, to break the historical bourgeois institutions that bound us to the imperialist war and condemned Russia to the greatest hardships resulting from that war—if it was easy for us to break down external obstacles, then all the more acutely we have had to feel the full weight of the work of re-educating the masses, of organizing and instructing them, of spreading knowledge, of struggling against that legacy of darkness and lack of culture, of savagery and brutality, which we have inherited. Here the struggle had to be waged by entirely different methods. Here we had to count only on prolonged success and persistent, systematic influence from the advanced strata of the population—an influence that meets with the most cordial reception from the masses, and we often find ourselves at fault in giving less than we could give. It seems to me that in these first steps, in the matter of spreading extracurricular education, free education not bound by old frameworks and conventions, education to which the adult population is coming to meet—that in this area we have had, first of all, to struggle most of all against twofold obstacles. Both obstacles we have inherited from the old capitalist society, which to this day holds us, drags us down by thousands and millions of threads, ropes, and chains.

The first deficiency is the abundance of people from the bourgeois intelligentsia, who very frequently regarded the newly created educational institutions for peasants and workers as the most convenient field for their personal fantasies in the sphere of philosophy or in the sphere of culture, when very often the most absurd posturing was passed off as something new, and under the guise of purely proletarian art and proletarian culture something supernatural and incongruous was presented.{76} (Applause.) But in the beginning this was natural and perhaps pardonable and cannot be put down as a fault of the broad movement, and I hope that we shall, after all, in the end, get out of this and will get out.

The second deficiency is also an inheritance from capitalism. Broad masses of petty bourgeois laborers, striving for knowledge, breaking down the old order, could introduce nothing that was organizing, nothing that was organized. I had occasion to observe this when, in the Council of People's Commissars, the question arose of mobilizing the literate and of the library department, and from these small observations I drew my conclusions as to how poorly things stand in this respect. Of course, in greeting addresses it is not very customary to speak of what is bad. I hope that you will be free from these conventions and will not reproach me if I share with you these somewhat melancholy observations. When we raised the question of mobilizing the literate, what struck one most of all was that our revolution achieved brilliant success without at once stepping out of the framework of a bourgeois revolution. It gave freedom to the development of existing forces, and these existing forces—petty bourgeois, with the same slogan—"each for himself and God for all," with that same accursed capitalist slogan, which never leads to anything except Kolchak and the old bourgeois restoration. When you look at what is happening in our area of teaching the illiterate, I think in this respect very little has been done, and our common task here is to understand that organization of proletarian elements is necessary. The matter is not in ridiculous phrases that remain on paper, but in those urgent measures that are necessary to give the people now, measures that should make every literate person regard it as his obligation, as the necessity of teaching several illiterates. This has been proclaimed in our decree.{77} In this area, however, almost nothing has been done.

When I came into contact in the Council of People's Commissars with another question, the library question, I said to myself: those complaints that were constantly heard—that our production backwardness is to blame, that we have few books and cannot produce them in sufficient quantity—I tell myself—this is true. Of course, we have no fuel, the factories stand idle, there is little paper, and we cannot get books. All this is correct, but besides this it is also correct that we cannot take the books that we do have. We continue to suffer in this respect from peasant naiveté and peasant helplessness, when the peasant, having robbed the master's library, fled to his home and was afraid that someone might take it from him, because the thought that there might be proper distribution, that the treasury is not something hateful, that the treasury is the common possession of workers and laborers—this consciousness could not yet have emerged in him. The undeveloped peasant masses are not to blame for this, and from the point of view of the development of the revolution this is entirely lawful—it is an inevitable stage, and when the peasant took a library to himself and kept it hidden from others, he could not act otherwise, because he did not understand that it was possible to unite the libraries of Russia into one, that there would be enough books to satisfy the literate and to teach the illiterate. Now it is necessary to struggle against the remnants of disorganization, with chaos, with ridiculous departmental disputes. This must be our principal task. We must set about the simple, urgent task of mobilizing the literate and of struggling against illiteracy. We must use those books that we have, and set about creating an organized network of libraries that would help the people use every book we have, not to create parallel organizations, but to create a single planned organization. In this small matter is reflected the fundamental task of our revolution. If it does not solve this task, if it does not enter upon the road of creating a genuinely planned unified organization in place of the Russian senseless chaos and absurdity—then this revolution will remain a bourgeois revolution, because the fundamental distinctive feature of the proletarian revolution, moving toward communism, consists precisely in this, while the bourgeoisie was content to break down the old order and give freedom to peasant economy, which regenerated the same capitalism as in all the revolutions of former times.

If we call ourselves the party of communists, we must understand that only now, when we have finished with external obstacles, broken the old institutions, has the first task of a genuine proletarian revolution stood before us for the first time in its full scope and height—the organization of tens and hundreds of millions of people. After a year and a half of experience in this area, which we have all gone through, we must, at last, set ourselves on the correct path, one that would overcome that lack of culture and that darkness and savagery from which we have had to suffer all the time. (Stormy applause.)